don’t you apologize to me?” Lester Ray said.
“For what?”
“For every goddamed thing in my entire goddamed life.”
“Now fellas . . .” the woman Sherry interjected.
“Shut the fuck up,” Earl snapped at her, “this ain’t any of your business.” He peered at Lester Ray, his eyes narrowed to slits. Lester Ray knew his father was showing off, that he didn’t want to lose face in front of Sherry. Sherry, or whatever whore his father might be with at the time, was far more important than his own son. “You think you’re owed, don’t you, boy? You think the world, that I, owe you somethin because your mother was a fuckin whore, ran off and left her own little boy.”
“Leave my mother out of this,” Lester Ray said. He felt the burning of tears behind his eyes, and he did not want to cry. He would not cry. He had vowed he would never let his father see him cry, or anybody else if he could help it. He hoped they were tears of rage. Not the tears of the immense sadness that choked inside him, always.
“Shit,” his father said. “Well, I want to tell you somethin, boy, that I shoulda told you a long time ago. I ain’t your father. I wasn’t nothin but a dumbass boy, myself, stupid enough to take in a pregnant little old Gypsy girl, half colored is what she was. You didn’t know that, did you, Lester Ray? You’re part nigger, boy.”
“You’re lyin,” Lester Ray said. His father was inventing, making it up as he went. It was pathetic how desperately he was trying to justify himself.
“And soon as she got back on her feet good she was gone, leavin me with you, her part-nigger little love child.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Earl, tellin that boy somethin like that,” Sherry said.
“Didn’t I tell you to shut up, woman?!” He turned and cocked his fist at her.
“I’ll tell you this,” Lester Ray said tightly, “if what you say is true, then I’m relieved! I’m glad as hell you’re not my father. You’re nothin but a fuckin drunk.”
“I warned you, boy,” Earl said, whirling back around to Lester Ray. He was practically in the boy’s face. Lester Ray was taller than him by an inch, and they were looking eye to eye. His father’s face was flushed flame-red, sweat beading on his forehead and his upper lip. His eyes were wide and knifelike, stabbing at Lester Ray’s own. He reached out and shoved Lester Ray in the chest, causing him to stagger back half a step. The boy righted himself quickly.
It was something as unplanned and instinctual as a sneeze, so quick that it was over before he even knew he was doing it. The boy’s fist caught Earl on the mouth and nose and blood splattered as he went backwards, crashing against the wall. He slid down the wall and lay propped there, his head lolling to the side. Lester Ray had split his lip, and there was a lot of blood. His nose was probably broken as well. The front of the green jumpsuit was quickly covered with blood.
Earl did not move, his eyes closed. The woman let out a shriek. Then she stood next to the boy looking down at Earl. “You’ve kilt him,” she said.
Lester Ray was rubbing his knuckles, trying to massage away the stinging. “No,” he said, “he’s just passed out. I only helped him along a little.”
They stood there side by side for a few moments, gazing down at the inert, bleeding man on the floor. Then she looked at Lester Ray. Her face was broad and chubby, with her powder caked around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. She smelled of flat beer and talcum powder and strawberry shampoo. She winked at him, an expansive gesture that she, in her drunkenness, probably thought was subtle. “Less you and me, sugar, git somethin goin while he’s dead to the world, whatayasay?”
It flashed into Lester Ray’s mind that this might be the very picture of his mother, that this would be the woman his father would choose, the whore, his mother; it was unbearable to think that he, Lester Ray Holsomback, had sprung from the loins of something this hideous. He stood looking into her tired face, at her flat yet yearning eyes. His mother could not be anything like this. It was impossible. No. “No,” he said aloud.
“Why not, baby?” she said, completely misunderstanding his negative.
And it took him a few seconds to fully comprehend her question. “Because,” he said, “you make me sick to my stomach.”
Mrs. McCrory found her suitcase, but she didn’t know what to put in it. She put in a doily that had been knitted by her mother, yellowed and limp, and then she took it out. “What would I do with that old thing?” she asked aloud, as though a companion were in the room with her. She picked up a fly swat and inspected it closely, trying to decide what it was. She tossed that in. She decided she’d best put in some clothes; all she had were the cotton house dresses, so she scooped a batch of them in her arms directly from the closet, with the hangers still dangling from them, and shoved them in. Her underwear. The boy’s wife had stolen all her panties. She didn’t wear brassieres anymore, nor corsets nor stockings, garter belts, things like that. She opened the drawer expecting it to be empty and saw all her panties there, most of them washed thin with sagging elastic. “She must have snuck in and put em back,” she said. “I would’ve given em to her if she’d asked.” She folded all the panties in with the dresses.
She found an extra pair of shoes, exactly like the ones she had on, black and chunky and comfortable. She put them in, along with a pair of her husband’s old bedroom slippers that she happened to spy in the closet when she retrieved her long cotton nightgown. Then she remembered her medicine. She found a brown paper sack and went into the bathroom and dumped all the medicines, the ones she was supposed to be taking now and some as old as six or seven years ago, into the sack. She put in a jar of Vicks VapoRub and a bottle of Jergens lotion. She grabbed a box of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, a box of Bayer Aspirin, and a bottle of Hadacol and put those in, too. She stood looking around for a minute. “Well then,” she said, “I’m ready.”
She lugged her suitcase into the kitchen and put it beside the door. She got the shoebox of money out of the pantry and set it on top of the suitcase. Then she took a long, last stroll around the house. There were lots of antiques, no telling what they were worth, but she reckoned Orville would find out soon enough. Her eye landed on something she didn’t think she’d ever seen before, a little polished mahogany box with a tiny figure of a ballet dancer in a pink tutu on the top of it. The dancer was standing on one toe, with the other leg stretched straight out. Her arms were raised gracefully over her head. Mrs. McCrory picked it up, and when she did there was a little “ting”sound. She turned it around, discovering a key in one side. It was a music box! She wound it and released the key, and the dancer began whirling around and around, while the music box tinkled out a song she’d never heard before. Until it came to her precipitately and without warning what the song was. It was “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you.” “Well, ain’t that the prettiest little thing,” she said, as the dancer went round and round, and she decided she would take it with her. She must have seen it before because she knew there was something significant about it, but she couldn’t recall what it was; sort of like when you wake up from a dream and you can’t remember what it was about but you know it was a nice, pleasant dream and you’d like to go back to it but you can’t.
She sat down in one of the kitchen chairs to wait for Lester Ray. She felt confident the boy would be able to drive an automobile safely, because he said he could. He told her he had taken it around the block a couple of times, after dark. He didn’t want anybody to see the car and get suspicious why it was all of a sudden up and running again. He had told her they were going to Pensacola,
